this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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My cousin gave an old acer switch that she wasn´t using, its extremely underpowered with 2gb of ram, an old atom and 32 gigs of storage. I tried ubuntu with gnome because thats what i use on my main laptop and while it has amazing touchscreen support it barely runs. I then decided to try lxqt and it runs great but the touch support is really bad. Does anyone know a DE with a good balance between performance and usability? xfce doesnt really seem to have good touch support either and tbh i really dislike it.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You can give KDE/Plasma a try

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can definitely vouch for Plasma, the Steam Deck comes with it and it's great

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is plasma more lightweight than gnome?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh yes, by several metric tons. I've used both, calling GNOME lightweight would be hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love plasma and it's my go-to desktop, but it's also one of the heavier ones and I'm not sure it'll play nice with just 2GB of RAM. Maybe XFCE or something even lighter like LXDE/LXQT.

Trinity might be a little easier for touch as well, though I haven't personally used that one in years

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

You should try reading again, including the part where I indicated "it's my go-to desktop" (as in, what I use in the majority of machines).

I also have an old acer with 2GB of RAM. While it can run KDE, a standard install with such will not run very well. Been there, tried that.

(Also, if you read the article even the dude mentioned apparently moved to XFCE)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Just to add an offering that is not KDE the beta linux mint includes gesture support which is good for touch. In terms of usability it depends on what you want. If you like phone UI than GNOME with something like Ubuntu or Debian will be better. If you were alive in the 90s and liked the "traditional" desktop than something like KDE or Cinnamon(Mint) will be more comfortable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Debian 12 with xfce